By now, Terence Winter should really have gotten over being star-struck.

The creator of HBO’s critically hailed Boardwalk Empire has just finished writing Martin Scorsese’s next movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf of Wall Street. He’s writing a film for director Ben Affleck that will star Matt Damon as gangster Whitey Bulger.

And he’s currently collaborating with Mick Jagger and Scorsese again on a new series about the music business in New York City during the salad days of punk and disco in the 1970s.

“The first time I was ever in a room with Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger I was like ‘OK, this isn’t really my life,’” Winter said, after giving a master class at the Banff World Media Festival on Monday. “I’m going to be waking up pretty soon and I’m late for school or something. This is a dream.”

The music leanings of the Jagger-Scorsese show, which will also eventually air on HBO, may finally put a dent into Winter’s reputation as that mobster guy, which he first earned as a producer and writer for The Sopranos.

Boardwalk Empire is halfway through shooting a third season in New York City. Scorsese has been involved with the show since the beginning and even directed the Season 1 opener. This offered Winter his first bout of hero worship to get over. Taxi Driver, Scorsese’s violent 1976 character study, was the first movie that made Winter want to become a filmmaker when growing up in Brooklyn. And like Scorsese, Winter, who began his working life as a lawyer, will probably now be forever associated with the gangster genre. Not that he really minds.

Boardwalk Empire may be a story about organized crime, but it’s setting in the Prohibition era hadn’t really been explored on television since The Untouchables. Starring Steve Buscemi as Enoch (Nucky) Thompson, who is based on real-life New Jersey political boss turned racketeer Enoch (Nucky) Johnson, it has followed the main character from corrupt political boss to ruthless, cold-blooded bootlegger. While obviously reluctant to reveal any spoilers about the third season, it will take place 15 months after the shocking end of Season 2, a passage of time that has made the life in Atlantic City even more precarious for our anti-hero.

While Winter’s past credits have included everything from Flipper to the Cosby Mysteries to Xena: Warrior Princess, the four-time Emmy winner says he is most often sent mobster projects these days to oversee or write.

“That’s a song I sing particularly well, I suppose and it’s a genre I really like,” he says. “It’s every bit as legitimate as the Western or the romantic comedy. It’s fine with me. And this was a new way to do it. It was sort of the dawn of organized crime as opposed to the end of it, which is really where the Sopranos was.”

Winter acknowledges that there would likely be no Nucky Thompson without Tony Soprano, who provided the archetype of the anti-hero. Winter said Soprano was a groundbreaking character in his ability to be vicious while maintaining the audience’s sympathies. As with Nucky, it’s a complex balancing act. Tony stayed on our good side, Winter reckons, because he never hit his wife and, while he may have iced his fellow gangsters with ruthless efficiency, he never hurt an animal.

“There’s one scene with a yapping poodle, it was with Big Pussy’s wife,” Winter said. “He’s breaking the windshield and the dog is there. And there was a slight moment when I know the audience was saying ‘Oh my God, is he going to do something to that dog?’ We knew if he did that there’s no coming back for that guy. You can kill a million gangsters, but do not hurt a poodle.”

The long arc of a television series allows characters to show all their colours, Winter says. Al Capone, who shows up on Boardwalk Empire as a ruthless thug played by Stephen Graham, is a case in point.

“We show Al Capone at home with his deaf son and we see him welling up and being sensitive,” Winter says. “You’ll get to all the horrible stuff too, but I think anybody who is depicted completely and honestly, you’ll find moments where you think ‘OK I get it.’ You may not like the guy, but you’ll understand what they’re doing.”

That said, Winter admits that it’s their rough-around-the-edges, I’ll-do-as-I-please characteristics that make the mobster so appealing.

“I’m really boring in my life,” he says. “I got a wife and two little kids and I’m home at night. My life is fairly normal and regimented. These people just completely live outside the bounds of normal society. It’s fun to live vicariously through them.”

evolmers@calgaryherald.com

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